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We have a duty to inform, consult and involve people and
it is vital that we do so because they pay our wages!
The benefits to you of a sound approach to engagement is
increased satisfaction, efficient processes that are  tailored to meet
peoples needs and high quality services. We need to encourage active
engagement and provide different, tailored ways to make it easy and
interesting for our communities to get involved and shape how they want
their services to be delivered.
We can support you in this.
YCChange offers a wide range of techniques that
encourage active engagement. We have extensive experience in running
community focus groups, but we are much more interested in sharing with you
new skills and expertise.
We offer the Open Space technique which is a very
relaxed way of engaging, where people can input to discussions as and when
they choose – if they have said what they wanted to say, they can leave.
With this technique the community themselves own the recommendations for
improvement – and so building the capacity to deliver improvements
themselves.
Their “knowledge and practical
application of the Open Space process allowed the Board to work together and
develop a number of ideas which will be instrumental in the future
development of the Community Development Forum (CEF), a Forum working to
create better links with the community.”
Janette
Barlow
Head of Service - Customers and Business Support
Selby District Council
We also support the use of Social Media.
Many people are into communication and expressing their opinion through
Facebook, Twitter and also via text. We can help you maximise the
opportunities that technology faces – and this does not just mean engaging
with younger people, but with a wide spectrum of our community. Information
and engagement via the website is also key. We can work with you to
challenge the material you have on your website, its quality and its ease of
access for all.
We can help build skills in the community so that your
communities can support and improve services themselves. We set up Community
Engagement Forums and work with them to develop their own action plan. 
We bring together people in the local community, along
with partners such as the police, fire and rescue, health, housing, the
voluntary and business sectors and the local authority to work together to
improve neighbourhoods. We work hard to ensure that engagement mechanisms are
interactive.
We also train members of the community to become mystery
shoppers and to test out the quality of services, how easy they are to access,
the quality of information and the extent of opportunities for engagement. We
have our own tenant mystery shoppers who can support you in regularly testing
the customer experience of interacting with you as well as them supporting you
with training your own mystery shoppers.
Taking action as a result of customer experience is the
key to improvement. Your commitment to listening to feedback, taking action and
investing resources is key to success.
“YC Change's understanding of community
cohesion/ empowerment, the targets of the Local Strategic Partnership, and
providing Local Community Action Plan options, has been very helpful as we
continue to discuss what steps our Local Strategic Partnership may wish to take
in the implementation of this study.”
Ian Wolstenholme, Head of
Partnerships, Richmondshire District Council
We can help
• Community Action Planning
• Wide range of techniques to
support engagement with those who may be ‘hard to reach’ such as Open Space,
Community Cafe, Focus Groups, creativity through use of cameras, murals, vox
pops etc
• Social Media
• Tenant, Resident and
Customer Training to become Mystery Shoppers, Estate Action Officers, Contract
and Performance Management and Scrutiny
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